
The World Cup group stage ended deliciously Thursday, with one game decided by the always quirky notion of sportsmanship as a tiebreaker – and because this is the world we live in, a game which should have ended the same way but didn’t because someone who needed to avoid winning chose not to do so.
And before you America-first-last-and-only types start screaming about “those damned foreigners and their ties and their cards and their goofy sports,” there are lots of American teams in American sports that are flat-out dumping games every year – by design, and with the tacit support of their fans.
In other words, systems are meant to be manipulated. It all depends on what system under which you have grown accustomed.
The first case was Japan, which advanced to the knockout round despite having an identical resume to Senegal in all tiebreakers except card accumulation, and because Senegalese players Youssouf Sabaly and Cheikh N’Doye picked up yellows late in their draw with Japan Sunday, they went home. Senegal lost to Colombia, 1-0, as did Japan to Poland, so Japan went through on deportment, thus turning the old baseball saying, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying” on its head.
The potentially worse case, though, was England and Belgium, who had already both advanced, had the same record, goals and goals allowed, and played each other in Kaliningrad. Well, “played each other” isn’t really the case as much as “trotted around on field and used the ball as a prop,” because the winner of Group G was shipped to the Half-Bracket of Death (with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, France, Mexico, Japan and Cristiano Ronaldo) while the second-place team went to the far more clement Half-Bracket Of Not Half Bad (with Spain, Croatia, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Russia and Japan).
And Belgium lost by bizarrely winning, 1-0, on Adnan Januzaj’s second-half goal. Thus, Belgium gets Japan and then the winner of Brazil-Mexico in the quarterfinals, while England’s path is through Colombia and if that is accomplished, then the winner of Sweden-Switzerland.
It would have been better for all of us had Januzaj scuffed his shot, or had never taken it at all, because we as viewer/consumers want weird narratives more than anything else, and Senegal’s heartbreak wasn’t manipulated by an accident of play.
Worse, FIFA could re-examine the fair play tiebreaker if the soccermetric freaks who are already rising up on their smartphones to object to the card system as being too imperfect and not sufficiently mathematical. After all, that’s the orthodox approach that is making baseball’s Three True Outcomes an apparently less enjoyable opt-in for more and more people.
If England had tied the match out of an attack of brain bubbles, or if Belgium had held to the script that most of the game seemed to be heading toward, we’d have gotten the screaming overreactions that would have led to a kneejerk change in a system that truly captured the essential goofy charm of the World Cup.
Thus, this is a case for the fair play system to remain because of its glorious imperfections. Quirkiness to the point of jaw-drops is not to be dismissed as a storytelling device, and nobody will ever speak of Belgium 1, England 0 the way they would have had it been Belgium 0, England 0, and especially if the game had descended into a frenzy of fouling, time-wasting and referee-baiting in search of the yellow card that made the Jules Rimet Trophy a greater possibility.
I consider this day, then, to have been a tough day for the noble Senegalese, but a much tougher day for the rest of us. We saw the chaotic possibilities unfold before us and were denied them because somebody decided to try to win a game that demanded to be lost.
Somewhere, Sam Hinkie weeps.
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